I never stated that you said Socialism was evil, I suggested that you insinuated socialism was evil. More importantly I state that far to many Americans ignore the social problems they face... worse they make false dichotomies using the very insulations you use. France, Germany and Austria (where I live now) have serious issues related to socialism. However, I'd argue that these problems are less than those faced by the United States. After all while I am socialist I do see some benefits of some capitalism!
You've got an interesting point and one which my daughter experiences the brunt of. Many boys are flat fascinated by her skin color and her accent and then when their parents meet me they are confused by my shear whiteness. So she hears a weird mix of old Aryan nationalism and anti-Americanism which truthfully can be amusing because our family essentially is the antithesis of these ideas.
An side note which is tangentially related: I insist my family purchase the majority of our food stuffs from local farmers. This puts us in frequent contact with rural people, some of which have little experience with foreigners. So who do you hate? The family that bicycles to your farm and buys your goods or the scary bogey man you've never seen? Or Both?
You're ignoring the fact the fact the Mexicans they whining about are the ones that build their houses, watch their kids and sell them their drugs. I wonder how much money a Mexican drug lord would have without money from American users?
You've raised a very, very significant point. One my father truly believed in and in some ways I believe in it as well.
"If you are an American citizen it's your duty to make a valiant attempt to fix the wrongs in American society."
The simple answer is I've tried, failed and don't have a realistic solution to proceed further in righting the wrongs that exist in the US.
I am not Alexander Hamilton or some other founding father and to put it bluntly: my daughter is most precious thing I have seen to have graced this planet and I cannot bear to see people hate or suspect her (or my GF) due to the colour of her skin and our religion . So the irony was not lost on me when she became a minor celebrity in her current school for exactly those reasons.
The simple fact is that my family and zillions of other can live perfectly happily *outside* of the US.
Currently we live in Austria... but honestly it is not all that important. The important part is that people living outside of the US get along just fine.
Recently we have been to South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Cambodia, Thailand, Brazil and Peru. Outside of South Africa & Zimbabwe I wouldn't have any serious objections to raising my family in any of these places.
I have to tell you that I agree with a lot of what you are saying. I'm a 2nd generation immigrant who was raised on lectures about how wonderful America was and anecdotes outlining the superiority of American government and culture. Honestly I found the changes in America so repellent I moved and in doing so I learned a few interesting things.
Americans have no idea what communism or socialism is... or if they do they do not use this knowledge when exhorting the evils of these systems. Nor do they have an tangible idea about what police states or totalitarian states are.
The failure of unions is that they are abused by those people who profit by people being in them, if everyone was in a union of some sort (or none at all) this would not be possible or at least more difficult to pull off.
The US dollar sucks.
The US by many metrics isn't the best place in the world to live. A notable exception is making buckets of cash.
US Foreign policy is nothing short of evil.
Racism is more of a problem in America than people want to admit.
Xenophobia is a significant problem in America.
The American system of government is broken and given the behavior of Americans it appears altogether beyond their capacity to fix it.
You can not live in a "nice" society without paying for it... via taxes.
It's in all of our interests to do what we can to raise everyone we can to a certain level (I mean a level above Henry Ford's auto assemblers and Ray Kroc's fast food workers). This means public schooling, accessible health care, &tc...
You cannot create a better society by legislating morality but you sure as hell can make it worse.
Which is why I said you needed to use a encryption system with multi level layered plausible deniablity.
Just so it is clear what I meant by this is that it is possible to hide various groups of files in a single filesytem. The basic idea that it impossible to say what files exist or how many many files exist or how large in summary the files are, or even that the defendant has provided the totality of the keys denies a significant portion of the a prosecutors strategy.
'Rubberhose' has documentation which is a good place for beginners to start but I don't think the project is still actually making progress anymore. This isn't really an issue as there are a variety of methods to achieve the same goal.
Rubberhose also has a few statements on legal issues, I would discuss these with a lawyer before putting much weight on them. I have and the Austrian laws and my setup is expressly designed around them. I can not make statements about American laws or court systems as it possible that they are fairly different than the Austrian ones. In my opinion, and I am not a lawyer, before embarking on any encryption scheme you need to consult a lawyer competent in the laws in you jurisdiction; in my case it cost me less than the hardware I use.
If you have any other ideas regarding flaws in my setup I'd be interested in hearing them
I have tried this briefly but found it inconvenient to use on a daily basis. The system I am using is extremely transparent and I'm fairly confident in its security.
I think what you need is an encrypted filesystem with multi level layered plausible deniablity. There are a variety of such things in existence, and I think that truecrypt will do it for windows. I use OpenBSD myself.
If you choose to use an industry standard encryption, over an exotic more powerful but slower encryption, you can also buy used hardware encryption accelerators for a pittance. This will allow you use a strong enough encryption configuration to outlast the longest of court ordered discovery processes without a day to day performance penalty. I know that there are BSD drivers for them and I assume windows drivers are available from the manufacturer. VIA corporation makes a series of processors with inbuilt encryption instructions, which given the capabilities of the CPU itself are very reasonable and OpenBSD drivers are also available. Of course if you have a standalone server which in all likelihood will be mostly idle you could just run the 'most' encryption you could tolerate. I have no idea if employing a more exotic encryption would an advantage against these people but I know it's not particularly one against the crypto crowd.
With the existence of tiny & reliable high capacity flash drives it is possible, with a little planning, to dramatically increase the likelihood that during a court ordered search & seizure it would be disconnected, overlooked, and left behind. It is also possible that such devices could be removed on a regular basis such as when you are not home. Storing an encryption key on these could be a reasonable balance between security and convenience. Storing the root binaries on one limits the options of a hacker when the key is not installed.
It also helps to have a hobby that generates volumes of digital data. The reason that I have a 3 terabyte RAID array is because not only are drives cheap but I have a 16 megapixel camera and do _a lot_ of photography; not because I have a 400 gigabyte audio and 900 gigabyte video collection.
Now I will be the first to admit that it possible to screw yourself with this setup:
I use an OpenBSD server and a Mac for my desktop. It does little good to hide the MP3s somewhere else when iTunes keeps a detailed accounting of your collection. However after a fair amount of use it is possible to ferret out these little snafus and correct them.
I have been unable to find a wireless connection that was both secure & convenient so I don't use it (I haven't tried very hard because I don't really need it).
I'm sure any court would view this level of encryption and this setup as highly suspicious but outside of America I have the impression that the courts are little more fair in this regard and would not assume that not only are you a pirate but you are a terrorist as well.
If you have a hardware failure, a Jack Daniels moment, or you just plane loose the key you will be well and truly fucked without a subpoena resistant backup plan. I have a such a plan and have tested it (courtesy of Jack Daniels).
Incidentally it is also fairly easy to trunk a pair of gigabit nics together and maintain an admirably quick connection between your workstation and your server
I hear you on the Mexican food thing, this maybe the sole advantage of being forced to return to the US a couple of times year on business. I am convinced that my friends that remain in the US have become dulled to the myriad minor offences they are bombarded with on a daily basis. Every time I return to US I am shocked and pretty much stay that way until I get back on the plane.
Given the rate that formerly high technology materials make it in to competitive environments and then into the consumer market I don't think this is much of an issue.
Besides, an Apollo scaled project is beyond the capability of America.
I've been in the research & development business for pretty much my entire adult life. This, more or less, is what we do except on a different scale. I don't see anything wrong with building models of things in order to understand them more fully. Rather than attempting to solve the whole of the problem in one go they are trying to solve the parts of the problem that are solvable with today's material technology. Given a few more years doubtless the material engineering will begin to catch up and you will see things that realistically could be used in true space elevators.
More and more I see that this sort of prize is excellent way to foster development of new technologies. This should be applied to other technical challenges we face...
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I never stated that you said Socialism was evil, I suggested that you insinuated socialism was evil. More importantly I state that far to many Americans ignore the social problems they face... worse they make false dichotomies using the very insulations you use. France, Germany and Austria (where I live now) have serious issues related to socialism. However, I'd argue that these problems are less than those faced by the United States. After all while I am socialist I do see some benefits of some capitalism!
You've got an interesting point and one which my daughter experiences the brunt of. Many boys are flat fascinated by her skin color and her accent and then when their parents meet me they are confused by my shear whiteness. So she hears a weird mix of old Aryan nationalism and anti-Americanism which truthfully can be amusing because our family essentially is the antithesis of these ideas.
An side note which is tangentially related: I insist my family purchase the majority of our food stuffs from local farmers. This puts us in frequent contact with rural people, some of which have little experience with foreigners. So who do you hate? The family that bicycles to your farm and buys your goods or the scary bogey man you've never seen? Or Both?
I hate to tell you this but *socialism* isn't nearly as completely evil as certain people would tell you.
Certainly a few socialist votes in a government body would do a society good... but the American government is to broken to recognize this fact.
You're ignoring the fact the fact the Mexicans they whining about are the ones that build their houses, watch their kids and sell them their drugs. I wonder how much money a Mexican drug lord would have without money from American users?
You've raised a very, very significant point. One my father truly believed in and in some ways I believe in it as well.
"If you are an American citizen it's your duty to make a valiant attempt to fix the wrongs in American society."
The simple answer is I've tried, failed and don't have a realistic solution to proceed further in righting the wrongs that exist in the US.
I am not Alexander Hamilton or some other founding father and to put it bluntly: my daughter is most precious thing I have seen to have graced this planet and I cannot bear to see people hate or suspect her (or my GF) due to the colour of her skin and our religion . So the irony was not lost on me when she became a minor celebrity in her current school for exactly those reasons.
The simple fact is that my family and zillions of other can live perfectly happily *outside* of the US.
Currently we live in Austria... but honestly it is not all that important. The important part is that people living outside of the US get along just fine.
Recently we have been to South Africa, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Cambodia, Thailand, Brazil and Peru. Outside of South Africa & Zimbabwe I wouldn't have any serious objections to raising my family in any of these places.
Man, if you had even read my post...
I have to tell you that I agree with a lot of what you are saying. I'm a 2nd generation immigrant who was raised on lectures about how wonderful America was and anecdotes outlining the superiority of American government and culture. Honestly I found the changes in America so repellent I moved and in doing so I learned a few interesting things.
Americans have no idea what communism or socialism is... or if they do they do not use this knowledge when exhorting the evils of these systems. Nor do they have an tangible idea about what police states or totalitarian states are.
The failure of unions is that they are abused by those people who profit by people being in them, if everyone was in a union of some sort (or none at all) this would not be possible or at least more difficult to pull off.
The US dollar sucks.
The US by many metrics isn't the best place in the world to live. A notable exception is making buckets of cash.
US Foreign policy is nothing short of evil.
Racism is more of a problem in America than people want to admit.
Xenophobia is a significant problem in America.
The American system of government is broken and given the behavior of Americans it appears altogether beyond their capacity to fix it.
You can not live in a "nice" society without paying for it... via taxes.
It's in all of our interests to do what we can to raise everyone we can to a certain level (I mean a level above Henry Ford's auto assemblers and Ray Kroc's fast food workers). This means public schooling, accessible health care, &tc...
You cannot create a better society by legislating morality but you sure as hell can make it worse.
http://openbsd.somedomain.net/index.php?version=4. 0
Is anyone using a hardware encryption accelerator with OpenBSD? I'm considering a purchase but finding good information has been somewhat problematic.
Which is why I said you needed to use a encryption system with multi level layered plausible deniablity.
Just so it is clear what I meant by this is that it is possible to hide various groups of files in a single filesytem. The basic idea that it impossible to say what files exist or how many many files exist or how large in summary the files are, or even that the defendant has provided the totality of the keys denies a significant portion of the a prosecutors strategy.
'Rubberhose' has documentation which is a good place for beginners to start but I don't think the project is still actually making progress anymore. This isn't really an issue as there are a variety of methods to achieve the same goal.
Rubberhose also has a few statements on legal issues, I would discuss these with a lawyer before putting much weight on them. I have and the Austrian laws and my setup is expressly designed around them. I can not make statements about American laws or court systems as it possible that they are fairly different than the Austrian ones. In my opinion, and I am not a lawyer, before embarking on any encryption scheme you need to consult a lawyer competent in the laws in you jurisdiction; in my case it cost me less than the hardware I use.
If you have any other ideas regarding flaws in my setup I'd be interested in hearing them
I have tried this briefly but found it inconvenient to use on a daily basis. The system I am using is extremely transparent and I'm fairly confident in its security.
I think what you need is an encrypted filesystem with multi level layered plausible deniablity. There are a variety of such things in existence, and I think that truecrypt will do it for windows. I use OpenBSD myself.
If you choose to use an industry standard encryption, over an exotic more powerful but slower encryption, you can also buy used hardware encryption accelerators for a pittance. This will allow you use a strong enough encryption configuration to outlast the longest of court ordered discovery processes without a day to day performance penalty. I know that there are BSD drivers for them and I assume windows drivers are available from the manufacturer. VIA corporation makes a series of processors with inbuilt encryption instructions, which given the capabilities of the CPU itself are very reasonable and OpenBSD drivers are also available. Of course if you have a standalone server which in all likelihood will be mostly idle you could just run the 'most' encryption you could tolerate. I have no idea if employing a more exotic encryption would an advantage against these people but I know it's not particularly one against the crypto crowd.
With the existence of tiny & reliable high capacity flash drives it is possible, with a little planning, to dramatically increase the likelihood that during a court ordered search & seizure it would be disconnected, overlooked, and left behind. It is also possible that such devices could be removed on a regular basis such as when you are not home. Storing an encryption key on these could be a reasonable balance between security and convenience. Storing the root binaries on one limits the options of a hacker when the key is not installed.
It also helps to have a hobby that generates volumes of digital data. The reason that I have a 3 terabyte RAID array is because not only are drives cheap but I have a 16 megapixel camera and do _a lot_ of photography; not because I have a 400 gigabyte audio and 900 gigabyte video collection.
Now I will be the first to admit that it possible to screw yourself with this setup:
I use an OpenBSD server and a Mac for my desktop. It does little good to hide the MP3s somewhere else when iTunes keeps a detailed accounting of your collection. However after a fair amount of use it is possible to ferret out these little snafus and correct them.
I have been unable to find a wireless connection that was both secure & convenient so I don't use it (I haven't tried very hard because I don't really need it).
I'm sure any court would view this level of encryption and this setup as highly suspicious but outside of America I have the impression that the courts are little more fair in this regard and would not assume that not only are you a pirate but you are a terrorist as well.
If you have a hardware failure, a Jack Daniels moment, or you just plane loose the key you will be well and truly fucked without a subpoena resistant backup plan. I have a such a plan and have tested it (courtesy of Jack Daniels).
Incidentally it is also fairly easy to trunk a pair of gigabit nics together and maintain an admirably quick connection between your workstation and your server
I hear you on the Mexican food thing, this maybe the sole advantage of being forced to return to the US a couple of times year on business.
I am convinced that my friends that remain in the US have become dulled to the myriad minor offences they are bombarded with on a daily basis. Every time I return to US I am shocked and pretty much stay that way until I get back on the plane.
I moved to Austria.
I'll admit that the problems in the US weren't the only reason but they were a big motivating factor.
so... how much do you use on regular basis?
It is possible for the first comment to be redundant when it contains a theme seen over & over.
I wouldn't called this redundant I would have just called it stupid
Given the rate that formerly high technology materials make it in to competitive environments and then into the consumer market I don't think this is much of an issue.
Besides, an Apollo scaled project is beyond the capability of America.
Given the sort of Manday this has been for me...
no.
I've been in the research & development business for pretty much my entire adult life. This, more or less, is what we do except on a different scale. I don't see anything wrong with building models of things in order to understand them more fully. Rather than attempting to solve the whole of the problem in one go they are trying to solve the parts of the problem that are solvable with today's material technology. Given a few more years doubtless the material engineering will begin to catch up and you will see things that realistically could be used in true space elevators.
Well it seems that this will be won next year :)
More and more I see that this sort of prize is excellent way to foster development of new technologies. This should be applied to other technical challenges we face...
I have a small fleet of old laptops in my lab and Xtree is on all of them, been using Xtree for years.
I use a Mac as well and Quicksilver is better.
I would dearly, dearly love a "Macbook Nano" if Apple would only get around making it.
Another fine use for PICs. I love these things...
Of course uploading it to Youtube or Google Video is a good start.
But I think the real way to do it is come up with some sort of agreement with Rental by Post companies such as Netflix...
When you say documentary I think Netflix because they have the largest selection on the planet.